PAYDAY 3 Diamond District Guide: Rob Everything, Regret Nothing
The best way I've found to approach Diamond District in PAYDAY 3 is to start with the large store in stealth. It's the place with the most opportunities for something to go horribly wrong, so I'd rather deal with it while the entire street isn't looking for me yet.
After that, work your way back towards the stores closest to the escape van until you've secured 100% jewelry.
That's the important bit: you only need 100% to finish the heist. Securing everything is optional.
Which sounds obvious until PAYDAY puts one more diamond behind a locked door and suddenly you're risking the entire heist because apparently leaving $40,000 behind is now a matter of personal honour.
Diamond District isn't the only place PAYDAY 3 lets a sensible robbery deteriorate because you saw another bag. Head to our PAYDAY 3 hub for the next heist, route and terrible financial decision.
Diamond District objectives
Stealth
The objectives are the same on Normal, Hard, Very Hard and Overkill:
Steal and secure jewelry until you reach 100%
Escape
Optional: secure all loot
There are barely any Diamond District-specific differences between the difficulties. You get the usual global difficulty increases, but the actual job doesn't suddenly grow another leg on Overkill.
Loud
Same story here:
Steal and secure jewelry until you reach 100%
Set up the loot cage when required
Escape
Optional: secure all loot
The loot cage location is RNG-based.
So you don't need four different routes for Diamond District. Learn the map and the important security systems once, then adjust for the usual increase in pressure as you move up the difficulties.
My stealth route: do the large store first
I'd start with the large store.
You need QR access to get into the manager's office, where you can find the red keycard. That red keycard gets you into the vault, which can contain the rare stone. The red keycard can also be found in the surrounding area.
The medium and large stores are also connected, and the medium store has its own collection of things designed to ruin your afternoon: display-case alarms, lasers in the vents and QR access. I found the blue keycard on a guard.
That's why I'd rather start here.
If I'm going to screw up Diamond District, I'd much rather do it five minutes into the heist than after I've already carefully robbed half of Manhattan and started mentally spending the money.
Once the large store is dealt with, I work back towards the shops closest to the van. You don't have to strip every store bare. Get enough jewelry to hit 100% and you've got your escape.
Of course, PAYDAY then leaves more jewelry lying around.
And you look at it.
And it looks at you.
This is how greed works.
You can shut the guards outside
One of the smaller stores lets you disable the display-case alarms, which obviously makes stealing everything considerably less dramatic.
You can also use the shutters to lock guards outside.
I love this.
We've got masks, guns, keycards, QR codes, security systems and enough equipment to finance a small coup, and one of my favourite tactics is basically:
Close shop.
For a brief, beautiful moment you've defeated private security using the same technology as a bakery at six in the evening.
Unfortunately, the guards have evolved.
They now walk around the back.
So don't assume closing the shutters has somehow removed them from the game. It buys you room, but eventually someone remembers that most buildings have another side.
Still funny, though.
Clean the jewelry if you're staying for money
One of the stores contains a device that can clean jewelry and massively increase its value.
The cleaned jewelry values are:
Difficulty | Cleaned jewelry value |
Normal | $30,000 |
Hard | $36,000 |
Very Hard | $45,000 |
Overkill | $51,000 |
On Normal, I saw a $12,000 bag become worth $30,000 after cleaning.
Excuse me?
That's not cleaning. That's money laundering with a sponge.
If you're only trying to finish Diamond District, don't build the entire heist around it. If you're staying for extra loot and money, though, the difference is big enough that the cleaner is absolutely worth knowing about.
The jewelry workshop has two vaults
The workshop is another place worth checking if you're going after more than the minimum.
There are loose gems and two vaults inside.
I could open one vault using the code from the whiteboard. I found the code for the second one in one of the lockers.
There are searchable documents in here too. I haven't found a useful reason for them yet, so I'm not going to pretend I have. Maybe they're important. Maybe I've missed something. Maybe PAYDAY has simply discovered paperwork.
For the actual route, they don't seem to matter.
The rare stone can spawn in one of two vault locations across Diamond District, so don't assume it'll always be waiting in the same place.
And again, if you've already reached 100%, everything beyond that is greed.
Perfectly understandable greed.
We're robbing jewelry stores. It would be slightly worrying if we'd suddenly developed restraint.
Going loud? Find the thermite
Once Diamond District goes loud, the heist stops caring quite so much about your collection of QR codes.
Now we have thermite.
If you need to breach the locked vaults, the thermite can spawn in two places I found:
in the alleyway near the dumpster
inside the garage in the alleyway
The large-store vault is especially important here because once you've gone loud, the red-keycard reader is disabled.
So the sophisticated electronic security procedure has now become:
Set fire to the fucking door.
I appreciate the clarity.
From there, loud Diamond District is fairly straightforward. Keep securing jewelry until you hit 100%, set up the loot cage when the objective appears and get out.
Or stay for all the optional loot.
I can't tell you how to live your life.
I can tell you that "we already have enough money but I want that necklace" is exactly the sort of sentence spoken immediately before a perfectly successful robbery becomes a police documentary.
Normal vs Hard vs Very Hard vs Overkill
There really isn't much to say here, and that's useful information by itself.
The objectives stay the same across all four difficulties.
Your stealth route doesn't suddenly change on Very Hard. Overkill doesn't hide another jewelry store underneath the pavement. The loud route still revolves around securing enough loot, dealing with the loot cage and using thermite where necessary.
What changes are the usual global difficulty increases.
So learn the actual Diamond District machinery instead: where the stores connect, which alarms you can disable, where QR access matters, how the keycards fit into the route and where thermite can appear when diplomacy fails.
That knowledge carries across the difficulties.
Finished Diamond District and still haven't learned that greed causes most of your problems? See which PAYDAY 3 heists we rank among the best, and which ones we'd happily leave to the police.
Know when you've already won
This is really the whole trick to Diamond District.
Start with the large store because that's where I'd least like to discover I've made a terrible mistake.
Then work back towards the van, taking the easier stores until you reach 100%. Clean jewelry when the extra payout is worth the trouble. Go hunting for the rare stone and optional loot when you actually want the extra money.
But once that meter hits 100%, remember that you are allowed to leave.
PAYDAY will happily let you turn a successful multimillion-dollar robbery into an armed siege because there's still one bag sitting upstairs.
And the worst part is that I know exactly what I'm going to do.
I'm going back for the fucking bag.
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